The invention relates generally to electrical substations and more specifically to fault monitoring and diagnostics in electrical substations.
Electrical substations are an important component of the electrical power distribution system. Substations typically include a number of assets such as transformers, circuit breakers, substation batteries and battery chargers, capacitor banks, and underground cables, to name but a few. Optimizing the maintenance, repair, and replacement of these and other assets is a challenging task, particularly when system reliability is taken into consideration.
Most of the substation assets are high-voltage structures which deteriorate with time. There is a significant economic benefit in being able to selectively identify and replace those assets that have deteriorated significantly. The principal mechanisms that are responsible for the long-term degradation of these assets are erosion and cracking within or on the surface of the insulation. Thus, in the long term, monitoring the condition of these assets assists in the planning of asset replacement. More immediately it enables suspect components to be identified and replaced which extends the lives of assets.
The state of the art in substation inspection is manual inspection by trained personnel, usually performed about once a year. During manual inspection, human auditory assessment is usually employed, but it cannot cover the frequency range of digital equipment, and further it cannot be used for 24×7 surveillance. Infrared imaging is also an effective wide-area assessment method, but it has higher power requirements and is costly.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved substation fault monitoring and diagnostics system and method to address one or more aforementioned issues.